Servers crash after data centre overheats

The spate of hot weather in the UK claimed a notable scalp after a London data centre experienced a cooling failure, which caused several servers to overheat and crash.

By
Tom Jowitt
| Jun 01, 2009

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The spate of hot weather in the UK claimed a notable scalp after a London data centre experienced a cooling failure, which caused several servers to overheat and crash.

The Braham Street data centre, located in the City of London, and owned by Level 3 Communications, experienced a chiller failure on Sunday when one of the five units designed to cool the data centre failed.

"On 31 May, we experienced a problem with one of the five chillers in place at the site," said James Heard, President of the European markets group, in an official statement from Level 3.

"The faulty chiller is currently being repaired, and the other chillers continue to operate at the facility," he added. "Customers are being informed of the issue."

Techworld understands that the data centre itself continued to run as usual with no downtime, but that several servers within the data centre itself overheated and crashed.

"Apologies for the downtime, our data centre appears to have landed on the sun. More updates soon," it tweeted later.

The timing of the server crash for Last.fm was particularly unfortunate, considering that just days before, it had boasted (again via Twitter) about the uptime of one of its servers (1,244 days or 3.4 years).